Certain consumable products such as sticks or slabs of chewing gum may be housed in a package where the gum slabs are arranged in an array which allows for ease of dispensing an individual slab therefrom. The gum slabs may be individually wrapped so that a wrapped gum slab may be individually removed from the array in the package. Removal of one of the gum slabs creates a space in the array which allows the adjacent gum slabs become displaced. It may become difficult to remove additional gum slabs from the package especially if one or more of the gum slabs tilts or falls over within the package. Also, the remaining slabs may slide or move around in the package and may even fall out of the package.
Examples of commercially available dispensing package used to store products such as gum slabs are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,632,378 to Provost and U.S. Pat. No. 5,797,494 to Balling et al. Both Provost and Balling et al. show a package formed by a wrapper wrapped around a plurality of stacked products such as chewing gum. The wrapper includes a tear open upper end to expose the gum slabs for removal. An adhesive is applied to the bottom surface of the wrapper to hold the gum slabs releasably in the interior of the package after the wrapper is opened.
Some other examples include U.S. Pat. No. 5,125,211 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,029,712, both to O'Brien et al. which shows a reclosure stick gum package being a container having a front portion, top end portion and back portion. An adhesive front label is applied to the front portion of the container. A flexible adhesive flap is then applied which covers the label, top end, and back portions of the container. The flap also includes a non-adhesive pull tab. By lifting the pull tab the front portion is detached which removes the top end to open the package with back of flap remaining attached. The flap is resealable to the front portion of the package, to allow the package to be reclosed.
Furthermore U.S. Pat. No. 1,751,208 to Kappes describes a confection or gum package including an inner wrapper with series of corrugations to securely retain gum pieces such that when one piece is removed, the remaining pieces will not be dislodged and fall out. The package also includes an outer wrapper wrapped around the package to retain the inner wrapper in its original corrugated form as to prevent its own displacement from the package.
As presented by the above examples, a need exists to provide a product package which includes a container packet for containing an array of slabs with an additional reclosable covering so that when the package is opened, only a portion of the container packet is opened for consumer to remove the desired product while the remaining gum slabs are retained in the packet.